European Commission releases OFE report on Standards and Open Source

The European Commission has on 30 August published our report, analysing the collaboration models between Standards Development Organisations (SDOs) and Cloud Open Source software development initiatives. It proposes practical ways to further strengthen their interaction and to develop a roadmap of actions to improve the integration of open source communities in the standard setting process.

The report provides an overview of activities initiated by SDOs on
open source software. The mapping shows that for SDOs the collaboration
with OSS communities may have different forms and address different
aspects. First, some SDOs consider their collaboration with OSS
communities as simple exchanges of methodologies; they are looking at
understanding the ways of working and integrating Open Source mechanisms
into standardisation. Second, SDO communities look at Open Source as a
mechanism to provide implementations – often referred to as reference
implementations – of a specific standard or standards based
architecture. Third, some argue that the collaboration should go a step
further. For them, the collaboration should be in both directions, and
should imply that OSS communities participate in the creation of
standards that takes place in SDOs or transfer their results to SDOs for
further formalisation.

Considering this, three recommendations are provided for SDOs and OSS
communities in order to build bridges between standardisation and open
source:

SDOs and OSS communities should benefit from common actors that can
establish channels of communication, joint activities and partnerships.

SDOs can introduce methodological changes in order to make their
development process similar or adopt additional processes which are
similar to the ones used by OSS communities.

OSS communities should increase their involvement is the standards setting processes.

Based on the findings of this report, a model, called the Platform
Design Model, is proposed as a formalisation of the few successful
examples of interaction between standard bodies, industry, and open
source communities.

The information and views set out in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the Commission. The Commission does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this study. Neither the Commission nor any person acting on the Commission’s behalf may be held responsible for the use which may be made of the information contained therein.